Various: Three Score & Ten: A Voice to the People

This seven-CD set tells the 70-year Topic story with elan, from its conception as the Workers' Music Association through the earnest 1950s, when Ewan McColl hymned his "Dirty Old Town", to the talents who sprang from the 1960s resurgence and beyond; Shirley Collins, Nic Jones, Eliza Carthy. It's a cornucopia of cultural history. Strands of socialist and Hibernian pride have never vanished, nor the lyrical spell of ancient ballad and enchanted landscape. For timelessness, try Anne Briggs's larkish "Blackwater Side".